Why Necrons are totally broken?
Make our voices heard, send GW emails. I doubt it'll make a difference, but hey, we gotta try.
My biggest fear is that they fix the obsiously broken things (transports lacking transport keyword and some points reduction) but keep Reanimate as is. It doesn't scale well at all and good opponents can really easily ignore it.
Here's a draft of what I'd have to say to GW about the current state of Necrons. It's mainly gathered from reading the discussions here and some anectodal experiments from playing with them.
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I'll start with what has been working great for Necrons:
- Quantum Shielding: It's great. It sounds alien and is unique to Necrons, is a great rule that is relevant most of the time and feels very rewarding.
- Reanimation Protocols: Going back to a unique rule that actually puts models back in the table (as opposed to a plain extra save) was very welcome. The rule has issues and I'll discuss them in detail below.
Necrons are innacurately perceived as powerful. This is perhaps the greatest hardship on balancing the Necron Codex. On the surface, their rules sound powerful and intimidating, but a somewhat informed opponent can easily focus on the weaknesses and guarantee victory due to Reanimation Protocols inner workings.
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Reanimation protocols issues
- New rules wins: The new rendition of Reanimation Protocols (RP) feels very thematic, bringing back some of the post "FNP-esque" ruling of 6th and 7th. As much as it feels great though, its current iteration creates some crippling issues that I'll explore below.
- Negation Issue: The rule can be completely negated by opponent if he manages to wipe your squads. There is nothing the Necron player can do to prevent this and it basically means that the premium in unit cost paid for the special rule is lost.
- Scale Issue: Reanimation Protocols (RP) as is has a scaling problem in where it is strong in small scale games and loses power significantly as the games scale up. The more power your opponent has to wipe your units, the smaller the effect of RP is. The issue becomes even more significant if they fail to wipe the unit, as the power is at peak efficiency the more rolls you have to make.
- Please address this issue. As it is a key ability to Necrons and equals a premium on unit costing it should be carefully planned.
- Army composition issue: RP encourages large units to make maximum use of the ability, but that makes it so Necron Armies have to pay a tactical tax on top of paying a unit point cost tax already. Larger blocks of warriors means costlier base tax for detachments. It all results in Necrons paying several interests on top of the base unit cost that compound into very limited actual build choices. This also results in the army losing in on Command points due to the high tax of its troops choices.
- Conclusion: The combination of being easily negated by experienced players and the fact that it heavily impacts list-building into either ignoring it (going for Canoptek units or Quantum-shield spam) or sinking points into huge squads that don't do that much (basic infantry with no special wargear) means that Necron Players have a small toolbox to work with.
- Proposed exploration: Allow rolling of RP after a unit wipe in some fashion. Maybe allow them to bolster other units already on the table (enemies have to wipe ALL warriors to deny warrior RP) or allow Necrons to roll for wiped units (resurrection orbs should do THAT and be cheaper).
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Tombworld Deployment issues
- Cool new rule: It should feel like you are the master of a legion that can teleport troops on a whim across the galaxy, but the actual inner workings of the rules makes them just broken and too much a liability.
- Lack of Transport keyword: The lack of this keyword on our transports means that units arriving from Transportation Beams arrive from reserves and can't move after arriving.
- Lack of character support: Since you can only bring 1 unit at a time it breaks any type of character synergy as troops are isolated and unsupported, unless the player dedicates extra resources on an additional transport for the supporting characters.
- Losing the transported units is too great a liability: Since we lose the emergency disembarkation rules and just outright lose our reserved units, on top of the issues above, Necron Players simply don't feel like investing in transports and putting precious points in tomb-world development worth the risk of losing all that investment.
- Proposed exploration: Consider allowing characters to be beamed over alongside a unit deployed from Tombworld. Give every model able to teleport units onto the table the Transport keyword. Consider some alternative to emergency disembarkation or even just allow the units to safely disembark upon destruction and factor that in the points cost of a transport unit, something that makes Necrons feel even more advanced, ignoring certain perils that other races must consider when transporting units.
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Lack of character synergy
- Destroyer Lords are melee beasts, but buff a ranged option.
- Necron Lords are near useless as we usually invest heavily.
- Overlords only buff a single unit, as opposed to something like SM chapter masters and their buff auras.
- Proposed exploration: Explore the Necron Hierarchy. Make Overlords be able to buff more units the more Lords you have, make Lords cheaper and allow them to enhance an Overlord's buffs. Something unique to Necrons. Overlords could get a secondary aura ability based on supporting lords/crypteks.
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Lack of Psychic power counters
- Necrons should be somewhat resistant to Psychic powers, especially the ones that deal with Leadership effects.
